This Sunday I have been invited to lead Carols by Candlelight at Florence Nightingale’s church in West Wellow.
This time last month I found myself stood by a lake in the middle of the night. Wrapped in as many layers as we might be wearing tonight, and feeling a little like the Michelin Man. At my feet a light sprinkling of snow, but above me, from every angle, the most amazing display from Aurora Borealis, The Northern Lights.
We were in Norway during winter when the daylight is limited to only a few hours, but the lights at night were really quite heavenly; heavenly, but not the vibrant greens and purples we had expected, instead a silvery glow with with just a hint of colour. Yet those with specialist cameras, those with lenses which could detect the essence of darkness, revealed to us so much more.
The human eye, you see, is rather weak. No matter how many carrots we may eat, we just cannot see in the dark. So the brain distils what is visible, removing what is unnecessary, removing the colour. I pondered whether this meant that nocturnal animals, whose eyes focus differently from ours, are able to view the lights in glorious technicolour. Do they see light differently from us? Has our evolution meant that we are blinded to so much of God’s glory?
If our eyes can only dimly see these displays of light, what other light do we miss out on? Just as our eyes don filters, do our hearts and souls also? Where else in our lives do we simply shut down anything that isn’t purely functional?
As we travelled through the dark to find the perfect spot to see the Lights, I was struck by the beauty of the Norwegian landscape. Not so much the fjords and mountains as wonderful as they are, but the homes and houses. Strings of fairy lights hung between homes and businesses, and frequently forming the shape of a heart. Light shone out from the darkness, but it wasn’t just these decorative lights; each home was lit from the inside out. Unlike our culture, the Norwegians seemed not have discovered curtains, or if they had, perhaps they had shunned them. Instead of choosing to gather the light and warmth within their homes, blocking out the night, they shared the light they had.
Norway in November is a dark country; stunning sunrises and sunsets bookend the 6 hours of light, however once the sun has fallen and the darkness sets in, the people of Norway become the bearers of light, allowing their homes to become beacons.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John 1:5
As we gather by candlelight at the darkest time of the year, we are summoned to see once again the full colour of the gospel story. We may think we know it inside out and back to front, we have heard it so many times over the years, we have sung it in carols, and seen it on Christmas cards; yet each of these encounters is viewed through a filter. Our understanding of Christmas is filtered by tradition, by expectation, by culture. Perhaps these filters have bleached the true colours. Perhaps tonight is the night that we view them afresh with eyes wide open, with hearts and souls ready to receive? And if our hearts and eyes are ready to receive the light which shines in the darkness, perhaps we can in turn become bearers of that light for others. We live in dark times and hope is in short supply, yet we are here tonight because of the light that darkness cannot overcome, we are here because we acknowledge that hope still thrives where hearts are open. In times like these it is natural to want to draw the curtains around us and hide from the darkness, but what if we all chose to pull them wide open and share a little light with each other instead? What if we chose to remove the filter of fear? What wonders could we see, if we chose instead to search for The Light?
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